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Nerval's Lobster writes "Tech icon Steve Wozniak has come forward with several predictions for 2013, with data center technologies an important part of the list. Wozniak's predictions are based on a series of conversations he had recently with Brett Shockley, senior vice president and general manager of applications and emerging technologies at Avaya. They trace an arc from the consumer space up through the enterprise, with an interesting take on the BYOD phenomenon: Woz believes that mobile devices will eventually become the 'remote controls,' so to speak, of the world. Although he's most famous as the co-founder of Apple, Wozniak currently serves as chief scientist at Fusion-io, a manufacturer of enterprise flash storage for data centers and other devices."

They should move this dumb tradition to the beginning of April. And speaking of dumb predictions, all of my dumb predictions last year [slashdot.org] came out to be true, even if there was a brain-fart of a typo; I meant Pirate Party, not Pirate Bay.

But yes, you are correct. I think that patent lawsuits will eventually paralyze "innovation" and all that will be left are a dozen or so mega-corporations with huge patent portfolios and incetuous relationships with the other mega-corps.

I was with you when I read #1.. then you went out on a limb and started guessing with 2-5. Here's a real prediction: at the end of 2013, things will be mostly the same as they are now. Yes, there will be some minor changes to the world -- but lets get real: it's 12 months.

Confirmed, I've seen in a keynote Jobs to type in some code and says "I don't know what I'm doing". In other one, he jokes about improved CPU branch prediction as "I don't know what that does -- predicts branches?"

From Woz's blog: "Steve didn't ever code [woz.org]. He wasn't an engineer and he didn't do any original design, but he was technical enough to alter and change and add to other designs. I did all of the Apple I and Apple ][ myself, including the feature choices. I did all of the BASIC myself (it's in handwriting as I couldn't afford an assembler). The only person who helped write some of the Apple ][ code was Allen Baum, who helped with the 'monitor' program."

I think Woz did more for Apple than Jobs. Yes, Jobs could code and such but he generally was better at making things pretty and usable in terms of vision...Woz did the heavy lifting.

Depends what you value more - being able to see raw talent and nurture it (Jobs) or having talent (Woz).

Woz is a great engineer. However, he wasn't very social and more than likely, had it not been for Jobs, he would've been working away at HP's calculator division through and through. Woz loved HP and didn't consider leaving (in fact, it was the hardest single decision he made to resign from HP).

Jobs could talk the walk - he was the one who could talk to customers and suppliers and get orders in for the Apple I. Heck, he was the one who got Woz the DRAMs necessary for the Apple I (even sweet-talking Intel into sampling some). Woz at the time was incredibly shy - he wouldn't dare pick up the phone, call a component supplier and ask for parts he couldn't afford to buy. Jobs could.

Engineers favor Woz naturally because he was the technical guy behind it all - without Woz, Apple wouldn't have existed. On the flip side, it was Jobs who managed to make it a business - Woz was happy to sell circuit boards and everything to hobbyists, while Jobs was the one who wanted to sell complete assemblies to everyone. Without Jobs' social talent, Woz would have continued designing calculators for HP, the Apple I board being just a mere curiosity and probably just a footnote in the history of computers. Had the two not get together it's likely the technology field as we know it would be completely different. The only thing I can't tell you is if we would be better or worse off, though. Woz and Jobs would've just been regular no-names in the field, though

re: "the technology field as we know it would be completely different".
Yes and no. There would be a different balance of powers. But I'm willing to bet that there would have been some other one or two or three person company that would instead have become the leader in supplying personal computers. And that other company would also probably have had a mix of creative talent and marketing/sales talent. .The converse of your specific example is also true. If Jobs hadn't teamed with Wozniak, perhaps Jobs

re: "the technology field as we know it would be completely different". Yes and no. There would be a different balance of powers. But I'm willing to bet that there would have been some other one or two or three person company that would instead have become the leader in supplying personal computers. And that other company would also probably have had a mix of creative talent and marketing/sales talent..The converse of your specific example is also true. If Jobs hadn't teamed with Wozniak, perhaps Job

The technology field would have been completely different? Within months of the Apple II, both Radio Shack and Commodore were selling computers that you could just buy, take home, plug a few things in (the TRS-80, anyway, don't remember if you needed to plug anything on the Commodore Pet), and run. These weren't cases of "Gee, Apple made something new, we should copy"; they were cases of "Gee, you can actually make a small computer that people can use now".

Sorry, but... What exactly has Woz done since the Apple I? Serious question. I mean, Jobs only resurrected Apple, upended the music industry, reinvented the smartphone and turned tablets from a joke into the future of consumer-oriented computing. I know all these achievements pale before the glory of Segway Polo alone, but I'm sure there are many other notable things Woz has gifted the world with over the last 30 years that I'm just completely ignorant of. I eagerly await enlightenment.

You should look at his latest adventure - Fusion-io. If you don't know them now, you will soon. They've been hiring the principle developers of BTRFS and the Linux Block-io head guru. Super-accelerated big-data flash storage is what they are into. Cutting edge stuff.

Here [rot13.org] you go, although he shuts down the Android stack on his device I believe you could use the same method while running linux on Android using this [google.com] package. I haven't tried running X yet but I do run Debian on my phone, I got tired of the crappy tools on the stock Android cli.

Unfortunately I have a tegra not omap. Still some work to be done for a native install on my tablet. I would however much prefer a working X11 server under android with full acceleration and multi-touch, nothing quite there yet.

I have noticed the death of the PBX. The desk phones are now nearly unused at the megacorp I work at. If you know someone you use their personal cell phone number, and if you don't know them you need the CYA audit trail that only email can provide. So the desk phones get dusty.

They have actually started ripping out the phones here. We'll probably always have them for queue, call center, help desk, help line type situations but the day of every drone having a phone are already over where I work.

Rather than being issued a laptop to work at home, my wife was issued rdesktop credentials to use as she saw fit, and had borrowing privileges at the travel laptop pool when she travels. Where I work they still use clunky as heck VPNs but I'm sure they'll catch up with the times and switch to a rdesktop/vnc solution sooner or later.

IT no longer creates new "client server apps" they create "intranet sites" and how you access them is pretty much seen as your responsibility.

Then your users are rather stupid and don't know the value of NOT giving out their phone number to people who can call them at any time.

If you are a friend, you call my phone. If you are work related, you call my office, which probably gets directed to my phone but you never call my phone directly.

Companies who allow their employees to use their own personal numbers are allowing their employees to take customers with them out the door. Its a really retarded idea. I suspect those companies won't stay arou

Companies who allow their employees to use their own personal numbers are allowing their employees to take customers with them out the door.

LOL I'm talking about a huge megacorp not a 3 person web startup. I don't even personally know salespeople much less work directly with them. I would not be surprised if they're lumped in with the call center as having special telecom rules for special people.

"Stealing the rolodex" only works for certain size companies with certain size customers when job hopping inside a oligarchical non-geographical monopoly industry.

I suspect GM marketing dept already has a perfectly good list of Ford owners, and if I

We are here partly due to the mass exodus away from 'ivory tower' client/server systems that started back in the 80s due people like Woz, but now we are running as fast as we can back to it.. With people like Woz riding shotgun with us..

Not that its a bad thing, as there are advantages to taking the user out of the 'systems management' part of the equation and handing it back over to the professionals.

1) Facebook is going to see it's user base decline. I suspect that many of the current accounts are fake, throwaway type accounts anyway. Full of fake birth dates, occupations and other such information attached to fake throwaway email accounts used for nothing other than signing up for Facebook. Sooner or later advertisers are going to catch on to this and stop wasting their time. Besides, Facebook is pissing everyone off with their intrusive privacy policies.2) Tablets are going to become the new net books. In other words, cute and portable but ultimately not very useful. Just another expensive toy for bored, rich westerners.3) Windows 8 is going to be a massive flop. Sure, the sales numbers will look good because it comes preinstalled on new PC's but user adoption will be poor. Windows 9 is going to look a lot like Windows 7.4) HP is going to clean house. So long Meg.5) SAAS (Software As A Service) is going to fizzle out. Salesforce will continue to do well though. Some things work well in a hosted environment (CRM for example), others not so well. Multi tenant architectures can save you money in the beginning but there are a lot of real limitations. You are sharing a database with other customers. You can't customize the software. Enterprise software will move back in house.6) No contract phones will be the way to go. Smartphones are pretty much maxed out on features now. Why get a new one? Take your off contract phone to a no contract provider and start saving some serious money.7) Factory in-car navigation systems will become obsolete. Too expensive to begin with and you have to update the maps (and pay again for that) every few years. Why bother when you've got Google maps on your phone for free? Simllarly, touch screen control centers in cars are going to go back to old fashioned knobs and dials. Touch screens are too distracting to use and difficult to see in direct sunlight. Maybe voice activation would be better - "Turn on the AC - 72 degrees".8) The instant gas prices go back down below $2.50/gallon Americans are going to flock back to big hulking SUV's.

Tablets. These are not going anywhere, I think--we've finally hit the point where computing power, battery life, weight, etc have hit a "good enough" point and produced a genuinely useful, handy device. They will get lighter, and (once they are light enough and foldable) larger, and most people five years from now will not have a "PC" on the desktop.

Car interfaces. Nav systems are definitely obsolete (especially the "insert the DVD into the optical drive to us

I'll admit to taking a bit of a gamble on the tablets but I really do see them as entertainment devices and not really necessary, especially if you have a good smartphone. Sure, you can browse with a tablet and tap out an email but some things are just better done with a keyboard.

Touch screens in cars are my pet peeve. The problem with touch screens in cars is that a) you don't get any feedback when you touch something (a click, a sound, something that tells you that you touched in the right place) b) you h

I've been working solidly for the past year developing in-house Android apps for auditing, training, product manuals, inspections etc etc. The enthusiasm and opportunity they create is something I haven't seen in the corporate arena for decades.

They're changing the way our business operates. They're not going away.

SaaS seems way off base. Is there a particular SaaS market that you see fizzling out? All of the clients I deal with are in love with the SaaS model because they can outsource the risk and the cost of running the applications themselves.

I am a bit biased. The company I work for is doing very well with SaaS offerings and has seen revenue triple in the last two years with growth projections continuing that trend. We are also in a fairly niche market, with specific offerings targeted at a growing market.

I don't see SaaS as a viable option for Financials, HR, Supply Chain or Payroll. Those functions are just too critical to entrust to someone else to manage. It's fine to have someone host it for you because at least you can still customize it to fit your needs. As you point out, there are niche markets where SaaS will work just fine. But business critical apps like payroll and supply chain...I just don't see big companies handing that over.

1) The systems I work with are niche like I said. We do electronic discovery. In that model, the systems are designed to get data out. During litigation, the data is forensically collected and then uploaded into the system for review. Once it is reviewed, it is produced and provided to counsel and the court. The applications themselves are COTS. The market is highly competitive and it is relatively easy to move data between vendors (provided they are using the same application). We also have a lot of custom

Dave - thanks for the detailed and well thought out reply. You guys are obviously taking security very seriously and are to be commended for that. I still suspect, though, that not all SaaS vendors are as vigilant as you are and your customer base will increase as a result of that.

"The SaaS market might shrink, but it is not going away" - Yes, I agree with that. As I said above, there are certain applications that are well suited to a SaaS platform. What I have seen with products like Workday is that they a

1) Facebook is going to see it's user base decline. I suspect that many of the current accounts are fake, throwaway type accounts anyway. Full of fake birth dates, occupations and other such information attached to fake throwaway email accounts used for nothing other than signing up for Facebook. Sooner or later advertisers are going to catch on to this and stop wasting their time.

Crestron DM system and AppleTV's allow my corporate clients to "throw" content to a display. You just have to be an apple ecosystem to do it. Mostly because Microsoft cant figure it out.

I know a LOT of clients that would kill for a Microsoft version of airplay. but it does not exist and will not exist for some time. (anything that requires a driver to be installed is already a fail. Airplay works without any driver installation)

If the It department were to hire real AV consultants that install real AV gear like the Crestron DM or Extron/Kramer systems that are like it along with embracing the current tech and working with it instead of against it, they can have it today.

And yes, I can get Apple TV (Last customer has over 240 of them across the business campus) to work in a corporate environment. It's not that hard if you have competent network admins and engineers.